Crossing Over to the Healthy Side

Since it's the new year and all, we decided we should try to cook a little healthier every now and then (not that our cooking is completely unhealthy, but it's good to be conscious of what we're eating). We had a productive day of hiking and decided that going home to eat leftover pizza (as awesome as that is) would ruin our active day. So we randomly thought of making some sort of vegetarian fajitas. At the store we picked up some eggplant, bell peppers, an onion, some firm tofu and tortillas. Tofu! Yes, tofu. I have never really cooked it before, but I've ordered it in restaurants. Greg thought eggplant would be a good choice because it's a more "meaty" vegetable. We hoped the combination of the two would replace the need for chicken or steak (if not in taste but in satiation).

Before cooking the tofu we decided to squeeze out the extra water by placing it between two paper towels weighed down by a baking sheet with a couple of bottles of beer on top. We hoped that this would help the tofu absorb the marinade better.

After looking through various fajita/Latin marinade recipes, we came up with our own recipe (for half a package of tofu and half an eggplant cut into strips):

1 orange (approximately 1/3-1/2 cup)
1/4 cup tequila
1 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoons ground cumin
2 smashed cloves garlic
1/4 cup chopped yellow onion
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp red pepper
1 tsp oregano
1.5 tbs olive oil
1 tsp salt

We combined the above ingredients and poured them in a zip lock bag with the tofu and eggplant slices for a couple of hours to marinate.

After about two hours, we chopped up the peppers and threw them in our new nonstick skillet along with the marinated veggies and tofu on medium-high heat for about 10 minutes until browned. It took a little while to cook the liquid out of the vegetables and tofu, but after about 5 minutes the mixture started to brown and smell good. I was pleasantly surprised that it actually smelled like we were cooking fajitas (which was a good sign for our marinade concoction)!

From Kitchen Assays

Meanwhile, I had to cook up our tortillas before serving. We like to buy the uncooked flour tortillas for tacos and fajitas because they seem to have a fresher flavor (plus it's fun to cook them). That's one of the good things about living in San Diego-- I don't think the uncooked tortillas are available everywhere. All you have to do is stick them in a pan until they start to puff up and then flip them over. It usually only takes about a minute on a pre-heated pan (you'll see some nice brown marks on the bubbles)

From Kitchen Assays

From Kitchen Assays

In less than 15 minutes we had some yummy fajitas to eat.

From Kitchen Assays

I'd say overall our experiment came out quite well. We thought the flavor was pretty good--nice cinnamon notes and a good bite. If we had to critique it, we felt like there was a little too much "squishy" from both the eggplant and the tofu and not enough firm or chewy. Maybe next time we'll limit the recipe to just the tofu or the eggplant. It might be nice to try to add some crisped potatoes (either by baking them or throwing them in the pan before all the other ingredients), or some other veggie. It would also be good to try other flavor combinations like lime juice instead of lemon juice (which we would have preferred to use, but didn't have any on hand). All in all, the fajitas turned out really nicely, and we're looking forward to working on the parameter of this experiment again!